https://xanadu.com/xuTco.html is Ted's most recent thoughs on thematter.
Ted once called me a libertarian, and I immediately set him straight. Not even close, dude.
God bless that crazy bastard. We used to make Americans so well.
If it is useful to me, then incentive modelling would suggest I should pay. If I get useless information, then I won't want to pay. If I get advertising, then they should pay.
But how do I tell what value I will extract from it before I have read it? Information/concepts/ideas are not like physical objects at all.
There might be ways to help with that, by free trial of x amount of words etc. but this would be hard to consistently implement.
Also, there is clearly information so dense, it is way more valuable, than some shallow, mindless post.
So the creators would have to up a price for every sentence? And the readers get that information, before they read and link?
Alltogether just way too complicated and impractical.
The technology became cheap enough that such a business model was unnecessary. Although it was considered in the early days of the Web. Early thinking was that you'd have to subscribe to everything, and there would be charges on your Internet bill for each service, like cable TV. You'd pay to subscribe to a search engine. The New York Times went that route successfully, but few others did.
I knew some of the people behind Xanadu in the 1980s. They were mostly everything-is-a-market libertarians.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexisNexis